Mick Dodson says it was a door slammed. He says Malcolm Turnbull’s response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart was “deplorable”.

Speaking at the National Press Club this week, he said Turnbull was guilty of “a gross distortion of what was said at Uluru and it’s shameful that it’s come from the head of the country, the person elected to lead the country”.

This distortion was done by press release. The greatest consensus ever reached in Indigenous politics was dismissed by email.

The voice to the parliament was formally mischaracterised. Turnbull made clear he would not argue for it and would not address misapprehension of it. He rejected the proposal not for what it was but how it might be seen. “It would,” he said, without irony or clear attribution, “inevitably become seen as a third chamber of parliament.”

Noel Pearson answered this speciousness with angry truth. “Turnbull, as prime minister, has chosen to lie about his prior knowledge of the proposal for an Indigenous voice, and indeed his endorsement of it as sensible more than two years before he rejected it…” he wrote in The Monthly.

“Turnbull supported the Indigenous voice to parliament when he was not prime minister, but then ended up calling it a ‘third chamber of parliament’ when he was, knowing full well that was a gross untruth.

“He did this because he was trapped by his political situation: devoid of capital, hostage to the conservatives whose leader he had stabbed in order to gain the prime ministership, and without the gumption to break his captivity.”

It is much easier to think of failings in Turnbull’s prime ministership than it is to think of successes. Even so, his condescending dismissal of the Uluru statement numbers among his worst. It will be remembered as the shame of his leadership.

It is through cynicism and lack of imagination that he ignores the voice of First Australians. He is content with their absence from formal recognition in the processes of our parliament. He has failed them and in doing so he has failed this country.

Earlier this week, Pat Dodson said First Nations people were willing to take a “pragmatic” approach to recognition. “The question of the permanency or guarantee of a voice in the constitution is a nice idea but it’s very difficult to see how you would be guaranteed an opportunity to have a say on legislation and policies at every point,” he said. “It’s still under investigation.”

Pat Dodson is working with Liberal MP Julian Leeser on proposals for recognition. It is worthy work, though slow and complicated.

It wouldn’t be happening if Turnbull had a willingness to believe in the country he is supposed to govern, if he had allowed the public a vote on the voice.

That vote would have carried, and Australia would be more whole for it.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
Jul 7, 2018 as "Razing a voice".
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As public faith in democracy collapses, the institution is further undermined by suspect polling, gormless politics and a media dependent on both.When the numbers don’t mean much, meaning must be attached to them. As the example of the recent Liberal coup shows, that can lead to disaster.

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Leah Jing McIntosh
Robin DiAngelo knows a lot about white privilege – it’s in her DNA. The American academic, author and anti-racism advocate talks about how structures of whiteness and so-called white progressives are continuing to damage the lives of people of colour. ‘I grew up in poverty … I was a feminist for most of my life before I realised I could also be an oppressor. But I draw from my experience of oppression … I think that helps. The key is not to exempt myself from being an oppressor, just because I experience oppression. Ask anyone if they’d rather be poor and white or poor and brown – I knew I was poor, but I also knew I was white.’

Wesley Enoch
Change the date, don’t change the date – I am agnostic. I think a national day could be a valuable tool in the binding of a nation, but only if it finds ways of including the three narratives, as Pearson has described them. I can imagine a three-stage national day of the future, one that stretches from our long First Nations history, through the narrative of the British arrival, to the waves of immigrant arrivals and life here now. Past, present and future.

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The Prime Minister’s Office insists Morrison only learnt about Broad’s use of a website for ‘sugar daddy’ arrangements on the day New Idea broke the story. It is simply an incredible and grave dereliction of duty on McCormack’s part. He lamely claims he doesn’t ‘tell the prime minister everything about every member of parliament’ because he ‘has enough on his mind’.

Richard Ackland
It’s the annual speech day at St Brutes, the very private non-selective school and training ground for future Nasty Party boiler room operatives and their underlings in Cockies Corner at the other end of the dorm. The headmaster, Mr Morrison, was hoping for a speech day built around the theme of “fair dinkum” – to reflect the authenticity of Australia and its values. A cat was set among the pigeons, though, when it came to light that “fair dinkum” was actually an authentic Chinese expression from the goldfields of the 1890s.

Always, there was some spectre, some looming threat – a capricious American president, the North Korean nuclear arsenal, Russia’s cyber sabotage, the possibility of Brexit’s economic devastation, the inevitability of climate disaster. We lived, in 2018, at the edge of chaos. Faced with chaos, it is human to attempt to find order. The impulse is one that tends from sense towards containment, control. It is no coincidence this year of ataxia spurred authoritarianism.

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